Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"It looks like BFG has finally received the final nail within its coffin and is officially "....winding down and liquidating its business" in their own words. Some of their customers who have recently sent in BFG video cards for RMA have begun receiving the following letter from BFG..."

It's a fairly rare thing to see a major technology brand name go down in flames; more typically they get bought up by another brand and the customers are taken care of. Not this time! I happen to own two BFG 9800GT passively cooled video cards, and both of them died on me (likely due to heat issues). I knew that BFG had exited the graphics card market earlier this year, but when talked to tech support about six weeks ago, I was told that even if they didn't have the exact model of graphics card in stock that I needed, they'd send me the equivalent product. Imagine my surprise when I got both of my broken cards send back to me with a note that basically said "Sorry we couldn't fix this - we're going out of business". Kind of sucks! I guess I should be glad they were relatively inexpensive video cards and not $600 monster cards. Anyone else get bitten by the BFG liquidation bug?

I just received the above message via email, and I've never quite seen anything like this before - XFX must feel pretty strongly about losing this card to email every customer they have in their database (I haven't bought an XFX card in a couple of years). The last line of the message made me chuckle; what inconvenience is it to me that XFX lost a graphics card?

Oh wait...just before I was about to his submit on this post, I clicked on the message, and was taken to this YouTube video. Apparently this is all part of a "Gamertainment Campaign" just like that last tiny line of text says. Nicely done XFX, you tricked me - now where's the unsubscribe button...

"The focus of this article isn't to dig into the minutia of where your graphics card RAM is being used. Instead, we're more interested in looking at the tangible impact that different amounts of graphics card RAM will have on your gaming experience. Our goal is to let you know exactly what advantage, if any, you can expect from a graphics card that has more RAM on-board."

I do not actually know anyone who has a video card with more RAM than the PC has, but I do know people who still use computers with 256 or 512MB of RAM. If you've been shopping for a video card lately, you have probably noticed that a lot of manufacturers are promoting how much RAM is on the card. Why? Well, RAM is a cheaper "upgrade" to a card than a better GPU. And who can resist sexy numbers like 768 megabytes or 1 or even 2 gigabytes? For gamers, knowing how to make the most of your money is very important and Tom's Hardware does give you an answer at the end. Unfortunately, the trend is towards laptops, notebooks and netbooks, and while they are improving, the opportunity to cherry pick a sweet video card is quickly diminishing.

"From top-to-bottom AMD had a successful generation of video cards thanks to its ATI Radeon Premium Graphics, providing competitive performance for the price, and an enjoyable gameplay experience across the entire scale. Apparently AMD’s "Sweet Spot" Strategy of scaling GPUs worked well for it in the previous generation, and it is using that philosophy to do it all over again with the new Radeon HD 5800 series."

AMD has been doing fairly well with ATI keeping up with NVidia in the Video card war, with each leapfrogging the other in predictable performance jumps. The latest attack is the ATI Radeon 5800 series of video cards. HardOCP got their hands on a 5870 model and it seems to put ATI firmly in the lead. Quite nice for a card that is supposed to start under $400. For the masses, of course, there is the 5850, but all the cards show friendly power consumption rates, especially considering the jump in performance they are giving. Now if they can only reverse the trend of the ever expanding video card enclosure, they have a customer in me. While I cannot say I upgrade my video card every 6 months, some of you might. Anyone looking forward to the 5800 goodness?

"There's no doubt about it, Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT has delivered the best bang for buck on the market since its launch, and it rightfully earned the title of bit-tech's best graphics card of 2007. It brings performance that gets close to long-time flagship—the GeForce 8800 GTX—to a price point that's somewhere between £150 and £190, depending on partner configuration. But for many gamers, that's just too much to spend on a graphics card and nobody wanted to buy the frankly disappointing GeForce 8600 GTS. Nvidia went some way to filling the gaping hole in its line-up with the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB and the GeForce 8800 GS 384MB, but neither were really better choices than the ATI Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards that collectively helped to turn things around for AMD at the back end of last year."

NVIDIA keeps cranking away, giving us faster and faster GPUs - but what's a bit curious about this new series of cards (based on the G94 GPU) is that the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB card benchmarks faster in almost every case. The pricing of the GeForce 8800 GT is just a bit above the 9600 GT, so it makes you wonder why anyone would opt for a 9600 GT. Not being a hard-core gamer, I haven't really kept up to speed with the video card market. For me, reasonable performance and pure silence is always my goal - to that end, all of my video cards are passively cooled. Most of my systems are using 7600-based cards, passively cooled, and my main system that I use for playing games (City of Heroes, Neverwinter Nights 2, etc.) is using a GeForce 7950 GT that gives me great frame-rates at 1920 x 1200 resolution yet is still completely silent. I'll pay attention to the 9000 series NVIDIA products when someone releases a passively cooled card.